The present invention relates to autonomous mobile equipment and a position-of-object and own position detecting system. More particularly, the present invention is concerned with autonomous mobile equipment such as a mobile robot or an autonomous vehicle that partly or totally autonomously moves while acquiring information on an ambient environment, and a position-of-object and own position detecting system to be included in the autonomous mobile equipment.
As for an autonomous mobile robot including an environment identification sensor, an obstacle identification device, an obstacle identification method, an obstacle identification program, and a mobile robot are described in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2003-269937 (Patent Document 1). Patent Document 1 describes a device that identifies the position and shape of an obstacle according to information on a parallax of an image produced by an optical imaging means such as a plurality of charge-coupled devices (CCDs).
However, the conventional method of analyzing an image produced by the optical imaging means such as CCDs costs high at present but cannot offer satisfactory precision and requires much time for one analysis.